Good news everyone! I wrote a user macro to perform bulk-type operations.
It fits the following two use cases (as written by Vicki above):
(a) move large sets of pages and associated files from one place to another
(b) delete large sets of pages and associated files (e.g., purge a space)
You can choose the pages you want from a list of checkboxes, so you can choose as many or as few as you would like.
Note that you must be running an installed version of Confluence (now known as Confluence Server) and have "Remote API" (under General Configuration) enabled.
They should be compatible back to Confluence 4.0 (although it might be a little ugly), but I haven't been able to test it exhaustively.
You can find the user macro here:
https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src
Navigate to "bulk actions tool" and you can find the macro under "bulk actions tool.vm".
Simply give it a name in the user macro browser (you probably want to select the option "Visible only to system administrators in the Macro Browser"), embed it in a page, and you are all set to go!
Selecting the pages you want is done by performing a search, so you may want to take a look at the following pages:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Search+Syntax
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Search+Fields
As an example, if you want to choose all pages that are the child of a particular parent page, search for ancestorIds:0000 -title:"Page Title", where "0000" is the pageid of the parent page (you can find this easily by clicking on the attachments and copying the ID from the end of the URL) and "Page Title" is the name of the parent page (if you don't include the second part, then the parent page will also be included in the search results). You can also choose to filter between dates to include only those pages created or modified between particular dates.
When you perform the search, any pages that are children of a page that is already shown in the search results will be highlighted in red and can be deselected by clicking on the "Deselect Children" button.
You should be careful, because deleting and moving parent pages have different effects on child pages (i.e. if you move the parent page, it will move the children pages with it automatically, and if you delete a parent page, it will move the child pages to the bottommost level of the page hierarchy (even below the home page). So for example, if you want to move all child pages but keep their structure, you need to click on the "Deselect Children" button, and then the pages will be moved along with their parents instead of all being moved to the same level underneath the new selected parent page.
The default maximum number of search results is 500, but this can be modified in the macro options. However, some versions of Confluence, especially the newer ones, are limited to 500 results, so please be aware of that. It is better if the number is high enough to include all search results (you can test by searching in another window), especially when moving pages, otherwise you might end up moving a child page without moving its parent. Therefore it is recommended to use only on search results of 500 pages or less. This is also a problem when filtering between dates, so be careful then, too.
I can see why Atlassian would be reluctant to implement this feature, as things can get pretty hairy if you're not careful, but this seems like too useful of a feature to not share with Confluence administrators. Please be careful, or you might end up messing up the page structure!
If you have any questions, you can e-mail me at stephen.deutsch@zanox.com, but I can't offer full support, so please use it at your own risk.
In my opinion the Delete Page operation should have an option/selection to delete recursive or not. I am a mere user of a massive Confluence installation and I get push back when asking for umpteen plugins to allows certain functions. The default installation should allow space admins more flexibility in managing pages. I also think that bulk selection/deletion of attachments should be an embedded feature. What a pain it is to delete attachments from pages one by one by one by one.![](/images/icons/emoticons/sad.png)
I will also be looking to see if there is a space admin ability to bulk delete comments from a page.